Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I’m trending on Twitter today. [laughter] My, “Yes!” claim to fame. You try to pay people equal amount for equal work, equal contribution, and equal level of expertise, and whatever championship quality you want to assign to that. There’s this hoo-ha right now about me getting a lot less pay for the same work as John McEnroe at Wimbledon. The BBC is a publicly owned corporation, but they would not divulge what people are making. Finally, they had to last year say how much people are making. Only people that are making £150,000 a year or more, anybody less than that, you don’t have to divulge. A lot of the part-time people did not make the cut, but John McEnroe did make the cut. He gets at least £150,000 for Wimbledon, while I was getting paid about £12,000, £13,000 for less work — less work, yes — but about maybe one third. It’s because I couldn’t get any more. I wanted to work more, but we were getting all kinds of excuses why I couldn’t get more, or other women weren’t getting paid as much as the men. I knew I was getting paid less, but I didn’t know how much less. Then when I found out, when this report was made public, it was like OK, now this is not just percentage. This is a multiplier. There was a program that just went out tonight actually. It’s kind of the 60 Minutes in the UK, called Panorama. I did an interview there, so now there’s a big to-do about it. It’s not between me and McEnroe. It’s not about that. It’s about women getting paid a lot less than men for a similar job. Maybe it’s because you get paid by the work. I’m trying to keep my answers really succinct. [laughter] Just saying. Here’s something Billie Jean King once said. I’m not sure, but I think she was referring to both men’s and women’s tennis. Quote: “I think tennis is a sexy sport, and that is good. The players are young, with excellent bodies, clothed in relatively little. It offers the healthiest, most appealing presentation of sex I can imagine, and we in sport must acknowledge that and use it to our advantage.” True or false? She said that? [laughter]…

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